


"I Already See It"

by lazyroughdrafts



Series: They Were Burning Dead Leaves [1]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Major canon divergence, Strong strong language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-04-25
Packaged: 2018-03-25 11:30:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3808771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazyroughdrafts/pseuds/lazyroughdrafts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There is another bed. And its sheets are rumpled too. Shaw's hair is mussed and sticking to her temples. She swats at straying fingers but does not recede. She stays..."</p>
            </blockquote>





	"I Already See It"

**Author's Note:**

> So this would definitely not be posted if it weren't for Randolhllee* saying to do it. So I did it. Thanks for saying very lovely encouraging things.

The door creaks and swings in muffled gasp, open. A susurration as a hesitant breeze follows and finds and then there is a shuffling of feet and a low thumping slide. Also muffled, contained. And then there is no sound but a densely brittle quiet. But Shaw knows. _Root_.

 

To sense it in osmium silence. To know first without seeing danger, to feel in hair-raised knowings before the smell of rusting iron assaults the senses or calloused fingers find what should be gelid skin. That fearless knowing is her gift honed and fine-tuned; a diamond to cut glass.

 

"Root." Shaw says her name like someone who knows enough to ask the right questions. Who knows when not to ask. Says it like a woman long-since weaponised. She isn't smiling when she sees her body leaning fully against the exposed metal beam, head rolled back exposing skin of a pallor best described as Victorian Consumptive.

 

"Hey, Sweet Lips," the breathless flirtation is followed by a smirk and then a humming that settles into a quiet that is vaguely disturbing. But neither silence nor pallor nor the ragdoll lolling of a head in her direction says more than the torpid flutter of lashes shutting. Shaw moves. Silently but quickly. And when she is mere feet away Root opens her eyes smirking as she shifts to lean in further, temple heavy against the coolness of the wall supporting her lanky frame, it is to find Shaw watching her intensely for a moment, limpid eyes offsetting a steel-trap jaw.

 

"Sweet Lips?" The terse echo, the calculated arching of the brow, the familiar rhythm of their banter this time perhaps masks. Perhaps unmasks. "I thought She sent you to Brussels.”

 

_Inflections for irritation, jealousy? Yes. Jealousy._

 

Root smiles cheek now pressed to wall, hair obscuring her right eye. The silence first splinters with the sounds of life agitating outside open windows. A man yells uninspired obscenities. Another answers tritely. Sirens follow the screeching of tires and a cacophony of car horns, some more belligerent than others, some feeble. Root still smiling speaks in a drawl too slow, too viscous to be merely languid, "Just dropped by to get me some sugar."

 

Shaw rolls her eyes. A gruff, _"Is that the best you can come up with?"_ nearly escapes her. But then Root's legs give way and she is sliding and she is at once the heaviest thing Shaw has ever held in her arms, dense and plastic and burning up. And it is jarring. The heat radiating off of her rings utterly discordant in her mind. Shaw slides and hoists her over her shoulder moving as quickly as she can to lay a mumbling Root on her bed.

 

"Didn't think that line would work so well. Who knew?" The words are barely decipherable but her lips still tease with the promise of more even as the Morse code of her eyelids flitting open and shut tell Shaw she needs to move fast.

 

Deft fingers tug and remove and tear away at clothes as a liquid gaze widens and narrows with the exposure of skin. "Slow down Sameen, what's the rush?" And Shaw doesn't roll her eyes, she doesn't want to stop the awkward repartee as her fingers work with increasing ferocity. She wants to keep her talking even as she sucks in a gasp at the extent of the injuries crudely bandaged by inexpert hands. "You know me. I like it rough." Her attempt at levity is a hollow rejoinder that echoes tin bells. Alarm rises with every touch of her hands to Root's scorching skin. Root who is labouring to keep her eyes steadfastly on those hands manages an almost gamely, "I'm all for rough play but easy Tiger."

 

"Root what is this?" Shaw turns her, her demanding touch alternating between too rough and cautiously tender. Root starts to speak but is caught off by, "And if you tell me it's but a flesh wound I'll hurt you for real."

 

"Okay. _Tis_ but a flesh wound." The shit-eating grin on Root's face silences her, relieves her for a beat. Relief fractionally displacing something else entirely; some unnamed thing confined to lexical abyss.

 

Root turns her head towards the window. Eyes at once tired and manic seek escape as she feels them pooling. At first she looks through a window, her vantage point yields scaffolding but not much sky but then her lids slide shut and then there is searing sky and pavement. And the pavement is not in New York or even Brussels. A screen. A window. A screen. _June 12_ _th_ _2015\. At 33.8869° N, 35.5131° E, a girl sits on a curb. It is 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Her mother is 17 minutes late._

 

Shaw leans back on her calves, gloved, medical kit strewn across rumpled sheets when something arrests her attention. She runs her fingers through Root's hair, raking for something. Intermittently cursing in low tones and calling her a _hot head._ Root turns and smiles. She sees it:

 

_There is another bed. And its sheets are rumpled too. Shaw's hair is mussed and sticking to her temples. She swats at straying fingers but does not recede. She stays as Root singsongs her name into her skin, nosing her shoulder between kisses that butterfly and wasp. And her fingers slowly rake at her stomach periodically spidering and threatening descent._

 

An almost happy humming noise escapes her before she winces as a thumb presses down on a fresh scar on a small protuberance at the back of her head. Root squirms underneath the pressure from Shaw's investigating thumb and the expression on her face. But it is the one that appears for exactly 1/15th of a second, written in the most primitive code that sears her mind: 1D+2D+4D+5E+7A+20E+21D+25B

 

 

And then pain. Diamond cutting glass. And then delirium. And then maybe she passes out from pain. And then a jolting slap across her face. "What did She do Root? What did you let Her do?" Shaw is angry and Root wants to tell her. And it is cold. It is cold and maybe the ice on her skin is hands on her bare shoulders. She thinks, she swears she hears pleading in the distance. Someone calling her baby? Baby?

 

_No, not baby._

 

Then there is icy water. Everywhere. "What did You do to her? What did You do to her you manipulative bitch."

 

Root's eyes flit open. She can hear Shaw growing feral with anger. Something breaks. Her eyes shut. She can see it. Shaw's face through the screen. Hears her voice growing louder and louder, metallic.

 

"I will destroy You. Do You process that? I will destroy You, You fucking cunt. Run Your fucking numbers!"

 

There is ice everywhere. Root is burning. She remembers something Sameen said one evening in Kabul about burning stars. About Sirius being the brightest star in the night sky, its surface burning at 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But Root knows. Knows more now. Diamond cutting diamond. There is ice everywhere and she is burning. And maybe her burning cheeks are evaporating tears. Shaw is angry and she wants to tell her. She wants to tell her everything: that they were worried about Samaritan but they should have been worried about a maelstrom they didn't see brewing. She wants to tell her that this is the only way. Because sometimes the numbers mean there are no more choices, no good choices. She wants to let her know. But she is burning in impossible degrees and there is only Morse code.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> *Leaves dead mouse here*
> 
> Okay, so randolhllee made a very helpful suggestion that I add a note to explain the numbers. The sequence is Facial Action Coding for the microexpression on Shaw's face...fear. As this is not my area of expertise (at all) looked at different codes online under FACS. The original I posted was 1C + 2C + 4B + 5D + 7B+ 20B + 26B. The one in the text comes from: http://www.facscodinggroup.com/facial-movements/facial-expression-fear.html. Although I have to strongly insist that that is NOT what Shaw's face looked like. Not even for 1/15th of a second.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_Action_Coding_System
> 
> Title is from 'I Already See It'--Kye Kye  
> Series Title is after Zsuzsa Rakovszky's poem.


End file.
